This course offers beginning and advanced graduate students an opportunity to practice using a range of theoretical approaches to the study of the spaces, global cultural flows, networks, processes, and forms of public culture within their own developing areas of research. The course focuses on readings readings and critiques related to the concepts of civil society, the publics and counterpublics, mass culture and mobilizations, and the flows, networks of circulation, spaces, media and technologies, and practices of consumption that produce and sustain such phenomena. We will collectively establish working definitions of key terms; review current literature and theoretical approaches to the analysis of public culture; compare modern features of publicness with pre-modern manifestations and functions of publics; and grapple with tensions created by the dichotomies of elite/non-elite and global/local.
Particular attention will be devoted to the different material forms through which publics have been imagined, addressed, and brought into being within specific historical moments and contexts (including each student's own areas of research interest). Although the coursewill pay particular attention to the unpacking and application of these concepts, debates, and issues as they pertain to South Asia, readings will be drawn from a range of authors and would be of use to students studying similar issues in other parts of the world.